From: Stig_Agermose@online.pol.dk (Stig Agermose)
To: updates@globalserve.net
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 1998 04:06:25 +0100
Subject: The Story Of The UFO Superhackers
Thanks to the Sunday Times.
Stig
*******
The schoolboy spy
Sunday Times - London
Sun, Mar 29 1998
The Americans called him their No 1 enemy, but he was only 16. Jonathan
Ungoed-Thomas reveals one of the strangest stories of the cyber-age.
On the evening of April 15, 1994, six American special agents sat in a
concrete basement at a secret air force base patiently waiting for an
attack. Their unseen and unknown enemy had for weeks been rampaging
across the Pentagon network of computers, cracking security codes and
downloading secret files.
Defence officials feared the infiltrator was a foreign agent. They were
monitoring his move ments in a desperate effort to trace him to his
lair.
He had first been spotted by a systems manager at the Rome Laboratory
at the Griffiss air base in New York state, the premier command and
control research facility in the United States. He had breached the
security system and was using assumed computer identities from the air
base to attack other sites, including Nasa, Wright-Patterson air force
base - which monitors UFO sightings - and Hanscom air force base in
Massachusetts. He was also planting "sniffer files" to pick up every
password used in the system.
This was a new type of warfare, a "cyber attack" at the heart of the
most powerful military machine on earth. But the American military had
been preparing for "cyber war" and it had a new breed of agent ready to
fight back against the infiltrator. Computer specialists from the Air
Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) and the Air Force
Information Warfare Centre in San Antonio, Texas, were dispatched to
Rome Laboratory to catch the attacker.
By the end of the second week of their attempt to outwit him, their
windowless basement room was a mess of food wrappers, sleeping bags and
empty Coca-Cola cans. Sitting among the debris, the American cyber
agents saw a silent alarm throb on one of the many terminals packed
into the 30ft by 30ft room. Datastream Cowboy, as he called himself,
was online again.
They carefully tracked him on a computer screen as he used the access
code of a high-ranking Pentagon employee to sign on. This gave him the
power to delete files, copy secret information and even crash the
system. As he sifted through battlefield simulation data, artificial
intelligence files and reports on Gulf war weaponry, the agents worked
frantically at their terminals, trying yet again to establish who he
was and where he had come from. It was futile. Datastream Cowboy always
bounced around the world before launching an attack and it was
impossible even to establish in which country he was sitting.
Suddenly he left the Pentagon system. The agents rapidly checked the
computer address of his new target and were chilled by the result: he
was trying to get access to a nuclear facility somewhere in Korea.
The shocked agents saw a terrible crisis coming. The United States was
embroiled in tense negotiations with North Korea about its suspected
nuclear weapons programme. The Clinton administration was publicly
split between a faction that wanted to punish the Stalinist regime in
Pyongyang for attempting to develop a nuclear bomb and State Department
diplomats who insisted on a gentler approach.
If the paranoid North Koreans detected a computer attack on their
nuclear facility from an American air base - because Datastream Cowboy
had assumed an American military identity by routeing his assault
through the Griffiss computer - they would be bound to believe that the
hawks had won and this was an act of war. Senior defence officials were
hurriedly briefed as the agents attempted to establish the exact
location in Korea of the computer that Datastream Cowboy was trying to
crack.
After several tense hours, they had their answer. His target was in
South Korea, not North. The security alert was over, but the damage
meted out by Datastream Cowboy was not. In the space of a few weeks he
had caused more harm than the KGB, in the view of the American
military, and was the "No 1 threat to US security".
What made Datastream Cowboy so dangerous, in the view of the Americans,
was that he was not alone; he was working with a more sophisticated
hacker who used the "handle" of Kuji. The agents repeatedly watched
Datastream Cowboy unsuccessfully attack a military site and retreat for
an e-mail briefing from Kuji. He would then return and successfully
hack into the site.
Both Datastream Cowboy and Kuji were untraceable. They were weaving a
path through computer systems in South Africa, Mexico and Europe before
launching their attacks. Over 26 days, Datastream Cowboy and Kuji broke
into the Rome Laboratory more than 150 times. Kuji was also monitored
attempting an assault on the computers at Nato headquarters near
Brussels.
It was only three years after the final collapse of Soviet communism,
but there was already a strong fear within the American government that
the United States had become vulnerable to a new military threat:
electronic and computer warfare.
Both America's superpower military arsenal and its huge civilian
economy had become reliant on microchips and in the words of Jamie
Gorelick, a deputy attorney-general: "Some day we will wake up to find
that the electronic equivalent of Pearl Harbor has crippled our
computer networks and caused more chaos than a well placed nuclear
strike. We do not want to wait for that wake-up call."
What made the American military so vulnerable was that the Internet -
the computer communications system that had been developed by Pentagon
scientists as a tool for survival after nuclear war - was opening up in
1994 to anyone in the world who had access to a cheap and powerful
personal computer.
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